SWINE FLU: Friends, family stunned by Hingham student's death

Thayer Academy students, alumni and parents planned to spend part of homecoming in silent meditation for Matthew Healey of Hingham, who lay gravely ill in a Cincinnati hospital. Instead, they spent the weekend mourning the death of the popular 18-year-old. Healey died Saturday, three weeks after being hospitalized with the...

Thayer Academy students, alumni and parents planned to spend part of homecoming in silent meditation for Matthew Healey of Hingham, who lay gravely ill in a Cincinnati hospital.

Instead, they spent the weekend mourning the death of the popular 18-year-old. Healey died Saturday, three weeks after being hospitalized with the H1N1 virus, or swine flu. He graduated from the private school in Braintree this past spring and was a freshman at Miami University of Ohio. The school is in Oxford, Ohio, and has about 16,000 students.

“We had arranged for a support ceremony for Matt to take place early in the day during homecoming,” Thayer Headmaster Ted Koskores wrote in the e-mail sent to alumni this weekend. “And it was with disbelief and the most profound sense of loss that we soon understood that this ceremony would take on a very different aspect.”

Students, parents, teachers and alumni learned about Healey’s death together.

“There is no adequate explanation for this loss, and our own memories of how fully and how well Matt led his life only deepen further the pain we feel,” Koskores wrote. “With Matt’s memory as our guide, however, we have no choice but to nourish the values of community and companionship he so evidenced as a student, as we reach out to his family and to all whose lives he touched. Matt would have it no other way.”

Thayer will hold a remembrance ceremony this week for the young man, according to Koskores’ e-mail.

A grief counselor will be at the school at 5 p.m. Monday for alumni, and at 6:30 p.m. for parents of alumni and current students at the Center for the Arts.

Miami officials also noted Healey’s death in an e-mail to other members of their college community.

Page 2 of 2 - “It is with deep sadness that I inform you of the death of Matthew Healey, Saturday, in Cincinnati,” Susan Mosley-Howard, dean of students, wrote. “Matthew was a first-year student from Massachusetts. The university extends its condolences and sympathy to his family and friends.”

Contacted Sunday, Miami spokeswoman Claire Wagner said other students at the college in southwest Ohio have also been treated for swine flu in the past several weeks. She said there have been a few swine flu cases reported at Xavier University in Cincinnati as well.

“In the last 10 days it has tapered off,” Wagner said.

Earlier this week, it was reported that another young adult living in Oxford, Ohio had died of the disease, but the Toledo Blade reported on Saturday that the tests were negative for the H1N1 virus that causes swine flu.

Kimi Young, 22, died Tuesday after she became ill with viral pneumonia. Friends and family had said that they were told Young died from complications of swine flu. Young graduated from Miami University last December and was living in Oxford.

In August, a 26-year-old Martha’s Vineyard man became the 11th person to die from swine flu in Massachusetts.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta has reported that about one in 13 U.S. swine flu deaths have been children and most of them have been of school age.

More than 40 U.S. children have died from the virus since it was first identified in this country in April.